


winging it

by astrogeny



Category: Fire Emblem: Kakusei | Fire Emblem: Awakening
Genre: Gen, Mentions of childbirth (non-graphic), Siblings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-30
Updated: 2016-05-30
Packaged: 2018-07-11 02:22:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,421
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7022704
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/astrogeny/pseuds/astrogeny
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Emm used to love to bless children, Lissa thinks.  She’d go to them one by one, newborn to awkward teenager, whenever she got the chance.  Lissa can picture Emmeryn’s hand on each child’s forehead, her benevolent smile (though the details of her face are harder and harder to call up, these days), but she can’t for the life of her recall what sacred words her sister would use.</p>
            </blockquote>





	winging it

**Author's Note:**

> a glorified warmup that turned into a vague sort of sibling study between lissa and chrom, as well as a bit on lissa as a healer. i think that constantly calling back to and comparing themselves to emmeryn is something that both chrom and lissa would do almost habitually, for years following her death, and i wanted to mix that w/some good old fashioned sibling banter, too. why are the randos in the beginning two women?? b/c it’s not me if i’m not shoehorning femslash into everything www

Exhaustion creeping in, Lissa moves surreptitiously to pick up her staves.  A few local healers have been in and out of the birthing room, helping her with the aftermath, but she judges that now would be a safe time to leave the baby she’s just delivered to his family.

“Will you bless the child, Princess Lissa?” the mother asks from the bed.  Lissa looks up with a start, jostling a loose strand of hair completely free from its pigtail.  It tumbles down gracelessly to cling to her sweaty cheek, though Lissa takes distant comfort in the fact that she’s hardly the only one who looks like she’s been through the wringer.

“Me?” Lissa echos, voice lilting in surprise.  No, the other Princess Lissa in the room, she retorts to herself, inwardly.  The other Princess Lissa who can be graceful both before and after half a day’s work delivering a child.  

“If it wouldn’t trouble you too greatly,” supplicates the baby’s other mother, taking the child from her tired wife’s arms.

“No, of course not,” Lissa rushes to respond, not wanting either woman to think she’s too snooty to put in a few nice words with Naga for their son.  She lays her staves aside to accept the tightly-swaddled baby, wondering briefly how he feels about being passed around from stranger to stranger like a hot potato.  His wrinkled little face peers up at Lissa from amidst his blankets, and she can feel his tiny limbs wriggling in fidgety bewilderment at the newness of his own existence.  

She tries to remember how a blessing for a newborn is even supposed to go–if she ever knew this nicety of a cleric’s many duties, she’s long since forgotten it in favor of all the harder minutiae of being a battlefield healer.  Emm used to love to bless children, Lissa thinks.  She’d go to them one by one, newborn to awkward teenager, whenever she got the chance.  Lissa can picture Emmeryn’s hand on each child’s forehead, her benevolent smile (though the details of her face are harder and harder to call up, these days), but she can’t for the life of her recall what sacred words her sister would use.  As per usual, when it comes to being a princess, Lissa decides that she’s simply going to have to wing it.

“Um.”  Off to a fantastic start.  Lissa takes a deep, calming breath, closes her eyes, and tries again.  "May you have a long, happy life, a home to always return to, and people in that home who will always love you.“  She lets the words hang there for a moment, hoping that they sounded serene and sincere, rather than childish or holier-than-thou.  Halfway through opening her eyes, Lissa suddenly squeezes them shut again, following up with a hasty, "In Naga’s name.”

“In Naga’s name,” both mothers intone, gratitude writ in the tired harmony of their voices.

—

“Are we done here?” Chrom blurts out, nearly the second Lissa rounds the corner into his line of sight.  Lissa snorts with utterly indelicate incredulity, plopping herself down into the chair beside her brother with an equal lack of poise.

“Chrom, really?  That’s the first thing you have to say after I’ve been off delivering a baby all day?  'Well,’” slipping here into an exaggeratedly deep imitation of Chrom’s voice, “‘We’ve popped that baby right out, so let’s move on, Shepherds!’  Jeez.”  Chrom bears her poor (though suitably cavalier) imitation of him with a long-suffering roll of his eyes, likewise devoid of princely patience.

“All right, all right.  At least you were actually doing something, as opposed to sitting around uselessly and making the entire manor’s staff uncomfortable just by existing.  I hadn’t meant to impose on these people for so long, is all.”  

“These people” being a minor noblewoman and her household, situated right along the coast of the small, landlocked sea between Ylisse, Plegia, and Regna Ferox.  Chrom’s advisers had described the noblewoman vaguely as “an eccentric mage”–a phrase that Lissa supposes is a politely condescending way of alluding to the fact that the woman has a wife.  She sees nothing “eccentric” about the hospitality the small detachment of Shepherds has been shown, their travel by sea delayed by stormy skies and stormier waters.  Indeed, Lissa is starting to feel proud of herself, for having a hand in delivering the baby and paying their hostess back, in some small way.

“They asked me to bless the baby, you know,” Lissa says, half to make it feel a bit more real, half to bask in her own usefulness compared to Chrom.

“They asked you?” Chrom repeats, with a little laugh of disbelief.  Lissa shoots him a glare, and his smile turns softer, more appropriately proud and brotherly.  "What did you say?  Gods know I’m glad they didn’t ask me.“

"I told him that if he ever has a little sister, he has to take her seriously and never be a jerk to her, or else he’ll wake up with frogs in his bed every morning.”

“That sounds more like a curse than a blessing!”

“Hey, so I’m a curse?” accuses Lissa.  She’s mostly just returning fire at his teasing, now self-assured with the knowledge that Chrom probably couldn’t have come up with anything better himself.  Thinking of her sister-in-law, pregnant in Ylisstol, Lissa can only imagine what a dunderhead Chrom will be with his own baby.

“You do have your moments,” Chrom admits.  He goes silent, then, as if mulling something over.  "Although,“ and Lissa is instantly wary, hearing the very timbre of his voice shift from a teasing older brother to a prince about to make a speech, "You did a great thing today, Lissa.  Make no mistake.”  Lissa averts her gaze a little.

“I’ve delivered babies before, Chrom.  I didn’t skip out on _all_ my cleric’s training, you know.”  She makes a show of nonchalance, not entirely sure how to face a rare compliment from her brother head-on, nevermind one delivered with an iota of eloquence.

“I mean it–it’s a great gift you have, to be able to save lives while so many of us are preoccupied only with taking them.  Every once in a while, even I wish…” he trails off, contemplating the hilt of Falchion that he seems to have taken ahold of subconsciously.  Emmeryn had refused to touch their father’s sword, but Chrom had taken to it so naturally that no one even bothered to test if Lissa could wield the one blade that might prove her of Exalted blood, Brand or no Brand.  Despite that, she can’t imagine Chrom as anyone or anything but Falchion’s rightful wielder, for all his private agonizing over whether or not he’s making his own legacy or merely continuing their father’s.  

“You wouldn’t last a day as a priest,” Lissa reassures him.  "If I had Falchion, you’d just bop people around with staves until they broke.“

"And you think you could lift Falchion?” Chrom teases in return.  He keeps his doubts so close, unlike everything else he feels, but Lissa knows when not to push him.  

“Hey, mister, you were actually cool for a moment, there–don’t be too quick to totally ruin it.”  Chrom reaches over and ruffles Lissa’s hair a little too hard, twisting even more of it free from her especially haphazard pigtails.  With an agitated groan, Lissa tugs off both her hair ties, letting the whole tangled mess tumble over her shoulders.  Chrom chuckles with the kind of obnoxious triumph only an older brother could exude.

“I must admit, I took that line from Frederick–he said it about Emm, once.  But I do believe it’s true for you, too.”

Lissa cuts herself short before she can even speak with a jaw-cracking yawn, the exhaustion she’d temporarily forgotten now settling back in.  About a second before the yawn ends, she remembers to cover her mouth.  Chrom snorts, a shared habit of theirs that he swears up and down he’s grown out of.  Lissa flops over to the side, resting her head on Chrom’s shoulder–the clothed one, of course.  If he’s going to tease her, he can be her pillow for a bit, too.

“Thanks,” she mumbles belatedly.  "Wake me up in an hour or so?“

"I suppose we can wait a little longer,” Chrom concedes, flicking up his travel-worn cape so that it covers Lissa as well.  It’s nice, Lissa thinks sleepily, to know that both of them are still winging it sometimes as a prince and princess.


End file.
